


i want you so badly (but you could be anyone)

by alaseux



Series: couldn't hide from the thunder (in a sky full of song) [2]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, M/M, Magical Realism, andrew loves ben and jerry's and u know what? he's valid, another one dedicated to taylor bc she's my best fucking friend, kevin is mentioned and so is riko, this is soft and im soft for these boys, vaguely awful driving on jean's part im ngl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-16 10:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18092294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alaseux/pseuds/alaseux
Summary: “I will cut out my vital organs myself before I let you drag me to fucking Texas, Neil,” Jean replies, and Andrew almost agrees with him on that one.“It could be fun,” says Neil, with a funky little gesture that Andrew thinks might be a half-hearted attempt at jazz hands. “Good food, at least.”(in which Andrew and Jean and Neil figure out some things about each other)





	i want you so badly (but you could be anyone)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maytay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maytay/gifts).



> hewwo here's another update on this series!!! title comes from florence + the machine's sky full of song (again lol)  
> this one's for taylor too bc god i love her so much (tay if ur reading this i adore u idiot)

Andrew isn’t one for regrets, but considering the fact that for the past twenty minutes, he’s been sitting on the hood of an old BMW on the outskirts of Nevada, eating a pint of Chubby Hubby as the sun rises, watching two boys argue over which state to run to next―he’s nearing something suspiciously close to contrition. He stabs his spoon into the ice cream and resists the urge to roll his eyes.

“I  _ know  _ you hate the south,” Neil says, harried. They’ve been over this at least six times, and they’ve been squabbling in the empty parking lot of this gas station for  _ forever. _ “But I’m just saying―”

“I will cut out my vital organs  _ myself  _ before I let you drag me to fucking  _ Texas,  _ Neil,” Jean replies, and Andrew almost agrees with him on that one. 

“It could be fun,” says Neil, with a funky little gesture that Andrew thinks might be a half-hearted attempt at jazz hands. “Good food, at least.”

Jean raises a singular eyebrow, and damn, Andrew has always wanted to be able to do that, so he pushes another bite of Chubby Hubby into his mouth to avoid looking jealous. His nose wrinkles a bit at the sudden cold.

“If I may interrupt,” Andrew puts in, after he’s swallowed the ice cream.

Neil and Jean turn to face him. Neil cocks his head like a confused puppy, almost as if he forgot Andrew was even there.

“Missouri could be a compromise,” Andrew drawls, like he doesn’t have a care in the world. “Not really the south, but not the north, either.”

Neil blinks. “Missouri?”

“There  _ is _ an interesting arch in St. Louis,” muses Jean. “I don’t think I would mind Missouri.”

Sounding relieved that they’ve finally reached a verdict, Neil says, “Yeah, me neither. Thanks, Andrew.”

Andrew waves off Neil’s gratitude in favor of climbing into the car and sprawling out in the backseat. The other two are quick to follow, with Jean driving and Neil taking shotgun. They’re on the interstate in a second, leaving behind the flickering streetlights and the lonely, leaky faucets of the outer-city Reno gas station.

It’s been a solid four hours since Andrew dropped everything back in Oakland to run away with Neil and Jean, and despite the constant bickering of his bizarre companions, he’s feeling pretty good. His foster mother had texted him several times, the bitch, and when he told Neil and Jean she was only looking for him because his existence under her roof won her a fat check from the state, Neil huffed and threw the phone out the window into a passing lake. Andrew, remembering the numerous times the woman smacked him when he used his wages to buy a month’s supply of chocolate bars, can’t find it in himself to feel bad about it.

They still haven’t talked about what happened back in the CVS, though, which has him a bit stressed, so he attempts to casually bring it up in conversation.

“So,” he begins, with the radio’s bass low and seductive in the background. Neil turns to face him, and Jean, after taking a long swig of the specialty no-sleep potion in his water bottle, catches Andrew’s eye in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah,” says Neil, like he knew this was coming.

“Am I allowed to hear your backstory, or is that classified information?”

Neil and Jean look at each other, as if in silent conversation. After a moment, Jean nods minutely, brushing a finger over the leaf tattooed on his cheekbone, and Neil’s blue eyes flicker with something dire, his own flame tattoo dark against his pale skin.

“You are allowed,” Jean says. “But, fair warning, it might take a while.”

Andrew leans back in his seat in preparation. “It’s a twenty-seven hour drive to St. Louis,” he informs them, so Neil opens his mouth and begins to speak.

“Jean and I have known each other for seven years,” he starts. “Ever since I was nine. We were sold to a formidable mage family within a few months of each other, so they bonded us together using a very powerful and very illegal spell. It’s unhealthy for us to be apart for long, and we sense each other’s emotions as well as physical and mental pain, which is why Jean was so distraught when I was in that sticky situation earlier.

“You probably don’t know of Riko Moriyama, do you? No? Be glad. He hails from the Moriyama clan, the mage family that bought Jean and me when we were younger. Riko, however, isn’t exactly in a position of power―his older brother is training to take over as the head of the clan, and since Riko is the second son, he was cast off at birth by the main branch of the family to live with his uncle Tetsuji, who runs the side branch in West Virginia. Riko was bonded to a boy named Kevin Day when they were eight; Kevin, who’s probably the most talented mage on this side of the Atlantic, was adopted by Tetsuji after his mother was killed in a car wreck. He was Riko’s right hand man ever since the beginning, and when Jean and I came along, Riko decided it was a good idea to brand us all as his own personal mages, based on our magickal strengths. You’ve seen the tattoos, yes? Jean is an earth mage, Riko’s a water mage, I’m fire, and Kevin is air, and we’ve all got the permanent ink to prove it. Riko was our captain of sorts; we were his steadfast knights and he was our king, or something like that.

“But Riko, who had based his whole little magickal kingdom on the fact that he was determined to become the best elemental mage the world had ever seen, soon realized that Kevin had ten times the power he did. So two weeks ago, after Kevin purposefully lost to Riko in a practice battle, Riko brought us all on a road trip to California for what was supposed to be a ‘fun vacation.’ Turns out, we really came because Riko had found a hedge witch in San Francisco who knew how to sever his and Kevin’s decade-old bond―by shattering Kevin’s left hand, the one he’s always used to cast. After the bond was broken, Riko could have gone further with no consequences to himself; he probably would have killed Kevin, if Jean and I hadn’t snuck Kevin out of the state and sent him on a Greyhound bus to his father in South Carolina.

“Riko found out what we did, though, because Riko always finds out. He tortured us for days, and when he realized we weren’t going to tell him where Kevin went, he finished things off with a double curse and released us into the wild, probably because he sensed how close we were to death. We eventually managed to break Jean’s curse, but we couldn’t figure out how to break mine, so we’ve been roaming around the city for two days, trying to fix me. I probably would have died without your help, you know. Riko sucks as an elemental mage, yeah, but his curses are potent.

“So now we’re here,” Neil finishes, and his voice is a bit gravelly. “On the run from some pretty bad guys, with basically no hope and definitely no help in sight.”

“Okay,” Andrew says slowly, processing. He blinks a few times. “I have a few questions.”

“Go ahead,” says Jean. His grey eyes look tired, and Andrew wants to take over driving purely to let him sleep, which is―a weird feeling for Andrew to have.

“First of all, who the fuck sells their kids to the magickal mafia when they’re  _ ten?”  _ Andrew asks.

“I’ll take this one,” Jean quips, like they’re on a game show. “My parents owed the Moriyamas a debt, so they uprooted me from my childhood home in Marseille and thrust me into the hands of magickal crime lords, because apparently children are acceptable currency in our world. And Neil’s asshole of a father works for the main branch, and he wanted to make some quick cash, so he sold Neil to Tetsuji.”

Neil nods his confirmation. Andrew doesn’t miss his flinch when Jean mentions his father.

“Okay, next question,” says Andrew. The sun’s fully up now, and Neil’s red hair is radiant in the gold light, and Andrew wants to run his fingers through it, maybe. “What exactly did you all do in West Virginia?”

“We lived in a mansion called Evermore,” Neil answers. “Well, we technically lived  _ under  _ it, in the basement, but same difference. And Jean and I were Riko’s toys, his experiments. He owned us, so he did whatever he wanted to us.”

“He liked injecting mercury into our veins and pushing us down the stairs to see how many bones we would break,” Jean says, and he tries to laugh, but it comes out sickly and strained. 

Sensing Jean’s discomfort, Neil intertwines his fingers with Jean’s, and Andrew wonders, not for the first time, if they’re dating.  _ Can the victims of an abusive psychopath even consider dating, though?  _ he muses, feeling sort of bitter and very disgruntled.

“That’s fucked up,” says Andrew.

“Yeah,” says Neil.

“Yeah,” says Jean.

Andrew asks, “Have you heard from―his name is Kevin, right? Did he make it to his dad?”

Jean and Neil exchange a look. “We haven’t even had time to contact him since this all went down,” Neil admits. “We should maybe, uh, do that?”

Jean adds, “We got him out, but we made it clear to him that it is his job to keep himself alive.”

“How likely is it that the Moriyamas will send people after you?” Andrew picks absently at his nails.

“Very,” they say in unison.

“Who will it be?”

“My father,” Neil answers, a little crease forming between his eyes. “And his circle.”

“Sorry we did not tell you,” says Jean, sheepish, “before we dragged you out of California.”

Shrugging, Andrew says, “It’s not like I had anything there to live for, anyway. At least with you two, I won’t be bored out of my mind all the time.”

“Fair point,” Jean concedes, right as Neil says, “So what’s your story?”

Andrew supposes that since they just trusted him with their own traumatic narrative, he can probably trust them with his, so he takes a deep breath and opens his mouth.

“My last name is Doe, like John Doe, because no one knows where I came from. I’ve been a foster child since birth―the longest I’ve stayed in any home is four months, tops, and none of the ones I remember have been good, which is why I was so eager to leave with you idiots.”

Jean’s lips twitch into something like a smile and Neil snorts, and their reactions light Andrew up inside.

“I’ve been to juvie six times,” Andrew tells them, reveling in the fact that their eyes don’t cloud with pity or fear when he speaks. “Grand theft auto and joyriding, mostly, but also incorrigibility, shoplifting, and B&E. I’m a mage, too, obviously, but I specialize in emphatic and plant magick, and I’m working on learning chaos magick right now.”

Neil’s eyes gleam in a not-completely-human way. “I love chaos magick.”

Andrew’s heart skips a beat or twenty, but he keeps his voice bored as he asks, “Are you any good at it?”

“Neil’s the best,” Jean informs him. “Chaos magick is linked with the fire elemental, did you know?”

Neil, looking exasperated, rolls his eyes before saying something to Jean in quick French. Jean smirks and shakes his head.

“Do you speak any other languages besides French?” asks Andrew, feeling left out.

“German, Spanish, Mandarin, and I’m learning Russian and Portuguese,” Neil says, off-hand like it isn’t the most impressive thing Andrew’s heard, like, ever.

“I speak German,” is all he can reply with.

_ “Oh, really? Where’d you learn it?”  _ Neil shifts seamlessly to German.

Andrew replies,  _ “Public schools require two years of a foreign language. I’m in my fourth.” _

_ “Do you like it that much, or is it just boredom again?” _

_ “Both,”  _ admits Andrew, and Neil’s answering laugh sounds like the crackle of a bonfire, bright and sparking.

“Thank you for coming with us,” Neil says in English. “Really. I think we’ll be a lot stronger with you here.”

Andrew holds up his pint of ice cream, now empty, and lies, “It isn’t personal. I’m only in it for the free Ben and Jerry’s.”

Jean laughs and Neil grins and no, Andrew really doesn’t regret this little runaway act at all.

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for reading ilysm!!! leave me a comment if ur feelin it :)  
> i'll try to update soon!


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